Enterprise DevOps Strategies for Kubernetes with Rancher

DevOps combines software development practices with IT operations to shorten the overall lifecycle of producing working applications. Storage is a key part of any IT stack, and today’s blog will look at some of the tools available to DevOps teams to better manage storage being used by applications in Kubernetes. Portworx makes it easy to manage and manipulate application storage for stateful applications like databases. We’ll show a few examples of what we mean below as well as include a video of how to do this.

Dynamic Provisioning

Portworx provides container granular volumes which can be automatically created on the fly for applications. Parameters can be set on the storage class or PVC for dynamic workflows including setting the filesystem, block size, snapshot schedule, replica count and more to best suit your individual volumes needs.

Volume to Container Introspection

Using the Portworx CLI or API, administrators can see exactly where their volumes are attached and what container is using it on a specific Kubernetes worker node. This also shows where the replicas are available and information about current active throughput and IO. This gives DevOps admins power at their fingertips for understanding container workloads and how they use storage.

Online Resize of PVC

DevOps teams can hook into Portworx monitoring and use metrics for capacity planning. This lets teams see exactly when they need to expand the capacity of an entire pool or just an individual PVC. Portworx enables online resizing of block volumes with no application downtime.

Application + Data Migrations across Kubernetes Clusters

Lastly, DevOps teams need to create a disaster recovery plan and one way to enable DR is by connecting two Kubernetes clusters and using Portworx to migrate the applications and data from one cluster to the other. This makes the complex problem of cross-site data and app recovery easy, and so even entire data center failures will seem like nothing ever happened for your users.

Check out the video below which will walk through each of these DevOps tools for managing stateful applications in the Enterprise.